The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Two guests as usual today. First in moments, Eric Blank will analyze last year's

teacher strikes and will report on what's been going on since.

And at the bottom of the hour, the Environmental Attorney Catherine Cayman will talk about

using a community reparations approach to environmental justice.

First, the teachers.

Last spring we saw a wave of strikes across the US as teachers, mostly in the so-called

Red States, walked off the job to protest low pay and chronic underfunding of their school systems.

The strikes started in West Virginia and then spread to

Arizona in Oklahoma. Why and how did they happen? Were they as spontaneous as some

people seem to think? Did teachers unions help or hurt? What's been happening more recently?

Here's Eric Blank, author of Red State Revolt,

The Teachers Strike Wave in Working Class Politics,

Just out from Verso to explain.

Blank, a former high school teacher now studying sociology at NYU, has been in the ground covering the

strikes ever since they got going.

Eric Blank.

A lot of people, I think, looked at these strikes and saw them as semi-spontaneous, but they were anything but spontaneous, right?

Yeah, that's a big misnomer. The organizers in West Virginia really spent months building up towards their action.

They were socialists.

They studied past strikes and they really made the strike possible. They weren't obviously the only people organized, but without them it's hard to imagine it happening.

So how do they do it?

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